Undergraduate tuition at Harvard—and virtually all other
colleges—rose sharply after 1980.

Tuition at Harvard, measured in constant dollars, nearly quadrupled during the
first seventy to eighty years of the century, then doubled during the last two
decades alone. The chart shows the trend in tuition only. When dormitory
charges, meals, books, and incidental expenses are added, the total bill for a year
at Harvard in 1997 came close to the median after-tax family income.

Some other private colleges were even more expensive. Public colleges had
considerably
lower tuition rates, but their charges also escalated sharply during the
last two decades of the century, outpacing inflation from year to year.

Although tuition and fees accounted for less than a fifth of the budgets of public
institutions and less than half of the budgets of private institutions, they were
much more amenable to institutional control than other sources of income such
as government grants and private gifts.

The recent rise in the cost of operating a college or university can be attributed
to a number of factors: (1) unpredictable fluctuations in the distribution of
student
choices among fields of study; (2) a dramatic increase in the regulatory and
reporting requirements imposed by government agencies; (3) competition from
Medicaid and prison-building programs for state support; (4) the continuing
exponential expansion of scholarly knowledge; and (5) the successive addition of
mainframe computers, minicomputers, and personal computers to the equipment
needs of libraries, classrooms, and offices.

These rising costs were met in large part by increases in tuition and fees. A
complex
system of scholarships, part-time employment, parental loans, and subsidized
and unsubsidized student loans filled the gap between what colleges charge
and what students and their families can afford to pay.

Harvard tuition costs from Ruth Loescher, Harvard Public Relations Office,
telephone
conversation with T. Caplow, February 18, 1999. See also Harvard
University web site, www.harvard.edu (accessed April 16, 2000), and “Money
Income in the United States: 1999,” Current Population Reports P60-209
(September 2000), table A.